The present invention relates generally to the harvesting of collaboration data, and particularly to a method and system that harvests collaboration data while preserving the privacy of the senders and recipients of the collaboration data.
Computational systems that enable people to communicate with each other play an increasingly central role in the functioning of large organizations. These computational systems provide a collaborative infrastructure that facilitates communication. The modern collaborative infrastructure can include file sharing, document libraries, chat rooms, application sharing, video conferencing and discussion forums to name only a few. Communications may be categorized as linguistic, such as an email, and as non-linguistic, such as file or application sharing. The communications, by their very nature, contain data that is of potential value to the organization. For example, an email not only contains information within the body of the email, but also associated metadata about who is communicating with whom, and when that communication occurs. The information contained within the metadata is just as valuable to the organization as the original message conveyed in the email.
Certain aspects of communication between individuals are often regarded as confidential and private. This is true regardless of whether the organization has a policy explicitly stating that all communications that occur over its systems are property of the organization. An expectation of privacy facilitates communication about a wide range of issues, some of which may be unpopular, tentative, or informal. Free and unimpeded communication between parties improves the quality of the decision making process of an organization and enables the organization to reach better decisions.
Existing solutions to ensure privacy include such methods as user authentication to the computational systems, which prevents unauthorized access to the collaboration data. P3P, also known as Platform for Privacy Preferences, enables a website to express its privacy practices in a standard format that can be retrieved automatically and interpreted easily by users. However, neither of these solutions allow the collection or analysis of collaboration data in an adjustable manner while also preserving the privacy of the communicators.
Therefore, an improved methodology and framework for harvesting and analyzing information from an organization's collaboration data is desirable. It is further desirable that the improved methodology and system preserves the privacy of the communicators.